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It wasn’t that I had never gotten to the intermittent fasting idea because it was too novel, nope. I
never absorbed the idea because I had been brain washed like so many others out there about the
myths of nutrition and dieting.
Make no mistake about it, I became interested in intermittent fasting for purely cosmetic reasons. I
had about 8 weeks to go until my first bodybuilding show of that season and I wanted to make sure
that my body fat percentage was lower than I had ever gotten it before.
‘Fasting increases the blood flow to the areas of stubborn body fat (alpha receptors)’.
That was the line that hooked me.
You see, men and women alike, have stubborn fat areas. There are two types of fat cell receptors,
beta and alpha. The fat cells with the alpha receptors are a bitch to try and shrink.
It just so happens that 99% of men hold their stubborn fat in the lower abdominal and love handle
areas while 99% of women pile on their stubborn fat in the glutes and the thighs.
If you were to touch your stubborn fat areas right now, you will notice that they are colder to the
touch. That is due to the poor blood supply to those areas.
When blood flow is poor it means, you cannot get enough blood in there to mobilize the fat stores and
then transport them out to be used as energy.
I was sold on that fact alone. This fasting thing, a concept I had poo-pooed so many times in the past
because it went against all the traditional dogma of breakfast and frequent small meals.
I implemented a 16-hour fast immediately. This meant that if I ate at 8PM, my first meal of the next
day would be at 12 noon at the earliest. At the time, I was eating 1,600 calories p er day, a number
which was very low for a man of my size, broken up to four small meals per day.
As usual, hunger levels were out of control for me. When you put the body in a position to go where ‘it
ain’t meant to go’, it will literally go into a type of starvation mode which means the metabolism
becomes much more efficient in terms of running off of fewer calories, hormones become skewed not
in your favor and as a result, hunger levels go through the roof.
When I took the same amount of calories and started having just two meals per day, my hunger
became much more manageable.
Devon and I were going for a walk later that week and I remember telling her that I hadn’t been that
excited about a nutrition concept for at least 10 years. I had found a principle that I knew I could
incorporate forever.